Flipping script on Texas abortion laws

In a world where facts actually matter, Texas lawmakers would hold hearings featuring experts on women’s reproductive health discussing how best to create policies that support women’s access to high-quality, evidence-based abortion care.

Unfortunately, too many Texas lawmakers don’t seem to care about facts. They ignore the needs and voices of women and their advocates. They disregard input and warnings from health care providers.

They enact abortion restrictions that ignore medical evidence and scientific integrity – restrictions that undermine women’s health and equality. And then they refuse to acknowledge the damaging effects of the abortion restrictions they put in place.

As abortion rights advocates, we have watched Texas lead the way when it comes to harmful political interference in the practice of medicine. That’s why we joined forces with other women’s health advocates and experts to hold a “people’s hearing” at the state Capitol to demonstrate what it would mean to have actual experts involved in making policy that affects abortion care.

At the hearing, we discussed the infamous Texas “bad medicine” laws, which are based on lies and misinformation and interfere in the practice of medicine.

For Texas health care providers, bad medicine laws contradict the medical ethics that shape their practices and their careers. For example, these laws force them to lie to their patients about abortion care, eroding the trust that underpins the patient-provider relationship.

When a woman seeks an abortion in Texas, she is given inaccurate information, mandated by the state, which claims abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, infertility and depression.

Texas’ mandatory ultrasound law, which requires a provider to administer an ultrasound and describe and display it, even over the patient’s objections – and the state’s mandatory delay law, which forces patients to wait at least 24 hours before obtaining abortion care – introduce medically unnecessary steps into the provision of care, wasting physicians’ and patients’ time and resources and driving up health care costs.

Similarly, Texas House Bill 2 forced clinics to close and physicians to stop providing abortion care because they were unable to meet medically unnecessary facility specifications or obtain medically unnecessary admitting privileges at specific hospitals. It is no wonder the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down last year.

But a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families shows that other bad medicine laws, including those described above, remain in place. For many Texas women, collectively they make abortion care unaffordable and inaccessible – putting this essential health service out of reach.

For example, because the ultrasound requirement is combined with a mandatory delay before a woman can receive abortion care, a woman must travel to a clinic at least twice, thereby raising the cost of gas and child care, forcing her to take more time off from work and, for many, adding a costly or prohibitive overnight stay.

Bad medicine laws create barriers to women’s access to health care and, in doing so, disregard women’s right to make their own informed decisions. They deny us the respect and dignity we deserve.

None of that seems to matter to the anti-abortion extremists who control the state Legislature, who continue to base their actions on “alternative facts.”

But it matters to women and families in Texas.

That’s why we won’t be silent when abortion opponents turn lies into laws, as they have again and again in Texas. When they put politics ahead of women’s health, we will continue calling them out – at our own hearings, in the media and face-to-face.

You can join us in demanding laws that are based on women’s needs and experiences, and that protect access to high-quality, affordable abortion care. Learn more at LiesintoLaws.org/Texas.